Taiwan 2024 (2/7) – Food Part 1

It may feel embarrassing to plan a whole international trip around food. But alas! No shame in that if the destination is Taiwan. Food is this island’s cultural heritage, national pride, and primary export. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is world famous but its boba culture may be more influential. It’s possible that more people are familiar with Ding Tai Fong as a brand than Foxconn. Heck, it’s evident even when you visit the National Palace Museum – its by far most prized treasures were this jade carved into a napa cabbage and a rock shaped like pork belly. The museum workers literally assume all visitors want to see these more than anything else and automatically direct the traffic accordingly. So yeah, we ate well on the mother island because it’d have been a sin not to.

Breakfast (Soy Milk Shops)

Leading up to the trip, ask the kids what they looked forward to in Taiwan and the answer was consistently 飯糰 fan tuan (rice ball). Hong and I had a longer to-eat list but traditional breakfast foods ranked high, too. Our family had such a deep love for Taiwanese soy milk shops and nearly all its standard fare, that we vowed to eat at as many of these as we could. We always ordered fan tuan, 蛋餅 dan bing (egg pancake), 蘿蔔糕 luo bo gao (turnip cake), and 豆漿 dou jiang (soy milk), and often got more things on the menu such as 米漿 mi jiang (rice/peanut drink). In 8 days, we ate at five separate soy milk shops plus a standalone fan tuan stand. We pushed to the edge of OD in quenching our craving.

Breakfast (Griddle)

The other category of classic Taiwanese breakfast is the sandwich shop with a big griddle out front. Like the Hong Kong cafes, these places serve western-styled foods with a distinct local flavor. My favorite is the burger with a fried egg.

We stopped by this 美而美 Mei Er Mei next to my elementary school a couple times, asked and was told that the shop had been there for 36 years. That coincided with when I started living in that neighborhood, and I do remember always seeing (and smelling) it as a kid. They had a self-service honor payment system with a pile of money on the counter. We were told to leave our bills there and find our own change. As we waited, a lady arrived on a squeaky bike to pick up her phone-in order. Before coming to a complete stop, she stated matter-of-fact that she had forgotten to bring money so she’d go home with the food and pay on a later date. The shop owner was cool with it.

Coffee

That fateful Spain trip turned us into coffee addicts, and so we found all sorts of excuses to visit coffee shops even after we had overcome jet lag. Taipei had all sorts of cafes ranging from those indistinguishable from the San Francisco stuff (including price tag, in some cases) to truly local flavors like brown sugar latte.

永康牛肉麵 Yong Kang Beef Noodle Soup

Among the amazing eats that call Taiwan home, beef noodle soup ranks high in my heart. We planned to eat lots of other things on this trip, but had to also squeeze in a visit to this storied joint. It’s adjacent to my elementary school, and my mouth waters thinking about the fragrance during the 11:10am break while my fifth-grade self climbed on the play structure across a narrow alley. I drew into my comic books this shop’s spicy beef noodles being the source of my super power, in the style of Popeye the Sailor Man and his canned spinach.

Three decades later, the shop remained unchanged except for the added hoard of tourists lined up out front. Hong and the kids have now joined me in my lifelong love for this brand of beef noodle soup.